Israeli Start-Up Speeds Web Browsing

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November 26, 1998 (9:54 AM EST)

By Mo Krochmal,

NetCognition, based in Ra'anana, Israel, has developed a Java-based product that speeds Web surfing -- without a faster connection.

The product, SiteAccelerator, combines a prediction engine with server-side caching technology to fetch Web pages in the idle time between clicks.

"It's quite amazing, but the concept is very simple," said Phillippe Lang, owner of LangOnline, an interactive agency in Oakland, Calif., that has been testing the product.

SiteAccelerator is designed to appeal to webmasters, said Eitan Ron, CEO of NetCognition, a start-up with its roots in the Israeli military. Ron, a graduate of Israel's Technion with an M.B.A. from the University of California at Irvine, most recently served as vice president of marketing and business development for ServoLogic.

"The concept is similar to what others are doing on the client side, but we are the only ones doing it on the server side," he said. "We are optimizing bandwidth."

The product, which runs on Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000, retails for $495, but a light version is available for free trial. A simple demonstration of SiteAccelerator is on the NetCognition home page, where navigation buttons on the left side of the page change from green to red as they load into the browser cache.

On the client side, a Java applet on the page makes the connection to the server, which then prepares the next page for viewing.

On the server side, webmasters can run software that analyzes a site's log files and structure to build a statistical inference of users' navigation preferences. That information helps the application make a good guess at what pages to preload, speeding the browsing experience.

"From our experiments, we see from two- to five-times improvements in cutting delays," said Ron. That improvement may vary, depending on the structure of a site. The application becomes more refined on sites with large amounts of traffic, as constant analysis of user behavior helps the software better predict what pages to serve next.

For webmasters like Lang, who designs and manages sites for companies like National Semiconductor, an incremental increase in browsing speed can mean more income.

"If average page views go up 2, 3, or 5 percent, you can see the benefits of it," Lang said. "If the pages come faster, people will view more pages, and that means more ads and more ad revenue."